Friday, May 6, 2016

Which Donald Trump Did Republicans Just Hand The Nomination To?

Election 2016: With Donald Trump now the certain nominee, Republicans have managed to pick the least reliably conservative candidate out of a field that started with some of the most experienced, dedicated and successful conservatives ever to have thrown their hats into the ring. And they’ve done so largely because the GOP “establishment” kept dropping the ball on conservative priorities. Go figure.

That Trump is not a conservative should be obvious by now to anyone who hasn’t been drinking Trump Kool-Aid for the past 10 months.

Just a few days ago, Trump claimed that “I’m a conservative,” and then went on to say “but at this point, who cares? We got to straighten out the country.”

Who cares? Isn’t the point he should be making that conservative policies are what’s needed to straighten out the country? If not, what is he espousing?

It is true that Trump routinely describes himself as “really, very conservative,” and the “most conservative person in the world.” But whenever he talks about specific policies, Trump almost invariably veers left.

In his Indiana victory speech, for example, Trump blasted North American Free Trade Agreement as the “single worst trade deal in history,” thereby aligning himself with very liberal politicians. On the campaign trail, he’s called for Bernie Sanders’ style government controls on drug prices, said the government should provide universal health care, and attacked GOP entitlement reform plans. He’s sided with left-wingers in claiming, falsely, that Bush lied the country into a war with Iraq.

These are things Trump said since he started running as a “conservative.” Before he announced his candidacy, he had supported President Obama’s massive stimulus and auto and bank bailouts, said he favored single-payer health care, proposed a wealth tax, and said he was liberal on social issues.